


Orbicular

by SullenSiren (lorax)



Category: Marvel (Movies), X-Men (Movieverse)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-09-23
Updated: 2006-09-23
Packaged: 2017-10-08 14:04:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,135
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/76381
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lorax/pseuds/SullenSiren
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Maybe roommates were like pets - spend enough time together, they start to look alike."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Orbicular

**Author's Note:**

  * For [imisstheobvious](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=imisstheobvious).



> Spoilers through the end of X-3. I fully intended this story to have less John and more Warren - but somehow it didn't go that way. Written for the x-men ficathon, where I drew said_the_otter. I hope this works okay for you!

**Orbicular**   
_"So the years spin by and now the boy is twenty.  
Though his dreams have lost some grandeur coming true,  
there'll be new dreams maybe better dreams and plenty  
before the last revolving year is through."  
\- Joni Mitchell, "The Circle Game"_

 

For five months after John leaves, Bobby leaves his side of the room untouched. Spare lighters in the drawer beside the bed, sheets rumpled, shoes shoved beneath, dog eared paperbacks haphazardly lining the bookcase on the wall. Some time, about a month after Alkali, Bobby realizes the room no longer holds the faint smell of smoke that he always associated with John. He misses it. Misses the flick of his lighter and the irritating way John had picked arguments with him whenever he was bored. Missed the insistent cajoling to sneak out after curfew, and the way John cursed a blue streak whenever he stubbed his toe on the chair by the desk - which he did at least once a week when he stumbled to the bathroom in the mornings.

Bobby just missed John.

Piotr was older and laconic, prone to quiet and deep thoughts. There was a sense of calm around him, and while Bobby and he were friends, it was different. They felt like friendly acquaintances, which wasn't at all the same as a best friend. There were other guys around, but they were older or younger. And it was different with girls. Wasn't the same as having a guy to play video games with or go hit some splatter fest movie.

So he kept his room the same and hoped that John would wise up. Come home.

The first time he saw Pyro, it's on the news, standing next to Magneto, a stream of fire shooting from his hands. Mutant terrorist, they called them, John's name printed in neat letters on the screen. He'd been smirking, eyes lit by orange glow. He'd looked dangerous and soulless. Bobby'd remembered how John looked after a nightmare, then, lost and trembling with teeth biting through his lip and ghosts in his eyes. Pyro's eyes had been empty. Bobby knew how easy masks were for John. How he could close off his expression, hide behind a sullen stare and a sarcastic smirk. How his gaze could looked closed-off. Faraway. Hostile, even.

He'd never seen him look empty. As if everything was carved away save for the fire-glow reflected in his gaze.

Bobby went upstairs and packed away John's side of the room. Slow and methodical, everything grouped by category. Clothes. Books. Personal effects. The journals John had scribbled in unopened - he'd never read them. It had always felt like too much of a violation of trust. Now it felt too much like a reminder of someone who'd vanished.

Xavier's voice sounded in his head as he carried the boxes downstairs. _"No one is ever so far lost that they cannot find their way home, should they want to, Robert. Remember that."_ Bobby stopped and then took John's things to the storage rooms, instead of packing them in the car to head to the good will. He went back upstairs, cleaned the room, stripped the sheets from the bed. And suddenly, it wasn't **their** room anymore. It was just his room.

Rogue helped, sometimes even without meaning to. She hadn't gotten enough of John for his echo to last inside her head, but there were traces - moments when she'd frown and there would be some echo there. Mostly she just let him miss John, which helped too. Sat by him quietly. She was good at that. Marie could keep silences well. John never had. Too long in the quiet and his lighter would flick or he would get up to move. When she asks him if he misses John, he tells her no. They both knew it was a lie, but she let it stand.

He and Rogue improvised. Thin scarves between their mouths, gloves on their hands. It was all careful and experimental and for a while there was a rush whenever they found some new workaround. But after a while it palled. He never pushed and she stopped pulling and though they were close and he wanted her, they could both feel themselves drifting away. She was frustrated - angry with what she couldn't have. (And sometimes when her voice took on that hard, bitter note he wondered if maybe she hadn't gotten more of John than he thought.)

And there was Kitty. Small, sweet, and vivacious, there was no bitter edge to her, no threat in her little hugs and kisses to the cheek. Kitty, who didn't expect anything of him. Who didn't abandon him at the first sound of a motorcycle and light up for another man the way she never did for him. Who didn't look at him with eyes that sometimes he couldn't tell who was behind. Rogue was more than herself and less and sometimes when she smiled there was a slyness to it that wasn't hers. Sometimes she growled beneath her breath with a wildness that wasn't hers either. It made it strange. It didn't mean he didn't want her - it just meant he wasn't sure. The days when she was all herself - wide smile and southern drawl, laughing at some bad joke - he thought maybe he was just making something out of nothing. He liked to make her laugh. Liked to see her happy.

Kitty was just Kitty. There was something simple in the way she wanted him. And when he sat in an empty room that didn't smell of a friend he missed, or wrapped his arms around a girlfriend he could never touch, some part of Bobby longed for simple. She told him once that John was an asshole, but she still misses him, and he says he doesn't. That John made his choice. She looked like she wasn't sure she believes that, but in the end she shrugged and said everyone makes mistakes. He's not sure if she means John was mistaken in leaving, or Bobby was mistaken in not forgiving him.

The Cure changes everything. Most days, he can't decide if it's for the better or worse. The day Rogue vanishes, Bobby feels sick when he realizes. On some level, he understands that she's not going just to touch him, but in some way she is, and he's not sure she should. He doesn't think that will fix what's broken.

He doesn't find her. Instead he finds Pyro, empty-eyed, taunting, and dangerous - no trace of John in his smirk, but John's ability to find his buttons. To push them. To piss him off.

He walks away because he's damned if he'll fight him, and damned again if he'll let John - Pyro - walk away first again. He should have known. Maybe he did, and he just didn't want to admit it. He hears the fire before he sees it and somehow finds himself spinning back to find John before he even thinks to put it out, expecting a riot of people running from him or attacking him. He wasn't sure what he meant to do, but it doesn't matter anyway because John is gone, and the fire blazes, shattered glass lining the streets and Bobby doesn't dare put it out because then his face may end up on the news, neat letters outlining his name as the newscaster smiles her white smile and tells the world how dangerous he is.

He just leaves.

When he gets back, he paces the empty of the room and thinks of Rogue's slow smile, of Kitty's shy hugs, of John's fingers flicking his lighter, and of Pyro's empty eyes.

He asks Storm to move to a single room after Alcatraz. Jubilee teases him about wanting to make sure he doesn't get a roommate now that Rogue's cured. Bobby doesn't answer, and Rogue just smiles enigmatically and shrugs, leaving it up to Jubilee's imagination.

They slept together when she came back because it was what they felt like they should do. It had been nice, and Bobby had held her afterwards realizing that this wasn't what he was supposed to feel. Obligated. Because he'd wanted her, but he hadn't because there was some string dangling down to choke him that said 'forever' because she'd changed what she was for him.

He should have remembered that Rogue knew him better than most. She kissed him, told him she loved him - and then she let him go. They didn't tell anyone, both needing to come to terms with it. But whatever they were meant to be, it wasn't lovers. It had taken the mistake of becoming that to realize it, though.

Storm smiles at the request and says she'll see what she can do. Her smile is slower these days, harder. She carries the weight of too many on her shoulders and she misses those who should have borne it with her. Bobby sees that. He _understands_ that.

He still can't help but be angry with her when she tells him that, in the meantime, he'll need to share his room. His room now, yes. But it wasn't always and the thought of someone else in the bed across from him makes something he doesn't understand ache inside him.

He gives in though, and Warren sleeps with his wings pulled over him like a blanket, real ones pushed down to the end of the bed. He's taller than John was, tips of his toes pushing over the edge of the bed. He smiles gratefully whenever Bobby tells him something - where he keeps the towels, how to work the laundry machines, why no one drinks coffee if Beast makes it. He's amicable but not friendly, keeping himself distant, sometimes snapping at Warren without thinking about it.

Warren tries so hard to do everything right that sometimes Bobby looks at him and wonders if that's what he was like, when he first came here. He's different now, he knows. Something bitter eating at his core, something angry lashing out now and then. Still Bobby Drake, but not the same as the boy he'd been.

Warren is like a richer, more refined version of what Bobby had been. He's the utter opposite of John and sometimes Bobby wants to bang his head against a wall and laugh at the irony that he finally understands why John is so angry now that John's so far out of reach he'll never be back. It only makes it funnier that part of the reason Bobby's so angry is John himself.

Warren will stay quiet. Like Rogue. Like Bobby himself used to be. No nervous pacing, no flicking lighter. Bobby likes the silence as much as he hates it. Warren doesn't press him, doesn't call him on it when he acts like an asshole. He brings food up if Bobby doesn't go down for dinner. He offers to let Bobby borrow his clothes, his expensive shoes, his Rolex. He's nice to a fault and sometimes Bobby wants to slam a fist into his face for it.

He wonders if that's how John felt about him.

They spend three months being cautiously friendly, Bobby burying the hostility he shouldn't feel and Warren pretending he doesn't feel the way Bobby closes off when he enters the room.

He isn't sure what prompts it, but one day Warren suddenly looks at him, wings drawn around him like a shield as he sits on his bed, reading a novel. (hard-backed and that bothers Bobby because John's had been paperback, and he'd loved books enough that he'd probably have killed for the slim hard-back novels that lined the shelves now). He catches Bobby's eye and then says evenly. "You miss your friend - the one who used to sleep here."

"No," Bobby answered, shrugging. "You saw him - he was an asshole."

Warren ignores that, asking in his careful, refined way, "Did he die? On Alcatraz?"

Bobby hears the smallness of his voice when he replies and hates it. "No." He should have. Would have, probably. Unconscious on an island Phoenix was dissolving grain by grain, man by man. Bobby had let him live. Bobby had carried him off the island, left him away from the cops and ambulances that swirled like buzzards over a carcass.

He wonders if they'd found him anyway. If there was a holding cell somewhere where Pyro paced the walls and flicked a lighter they'd taken away. Maybe they'd Cured him. Maybe they'd killed him. Maybe he was John again, when you took away the fire. Or maybe he just wasn't anything.

"You helped him, didn't you?" Warren's voice draws Bobby from his thoughts and he scowls. Warren, for once, ignores it. "There is nothing wrong with missing a friend, no matter what he's done," he tells Bobby quietly, as if he understands.

He doesn't. He couldn't. Pampered, isolated rich boy. Bobby stands up, moving away from him, toward the window. "None of your fucking business," he hears himself snap. And some part of him wants to laugh, hearing the echo of John in his words. Maybe roommates were like pets - spend enough time together, they start to look alike.

"If you don't want me here, you just have to say so. I'll ask Ms. Munroe to be moved," Warren tells him quietly, something sad in his voice.

"I never said that," Bobby answers, looking out the window still.

"You didn't have to." Warren falls quiet and Bobby taps at the glass. "Why did he leave?" he asks suddenly.

Bobby doesn't intend to answer, but somehow he does anyway. "Because I let him." It feels like the truth as soon as he's said it, and the temperature in the room drops. He sees Warren shiver from the corner of his eye, but it still takes a moment for him to get enough control to raise it again.

Warren stands, looking uncertain and a touch wary - like Bobby's something unpredictable and dangerous. Bobby wonders just how fucking far he's come that someone looks at him like that. He sits down tiredly at the desk, and Warren moves closer. "It's not your fault. He . . . I don't know all the details, but he chose to leave, didn't he? To join with the Brotherhood?"

"Yeah," Bobby answers. "But he walked away, and I fucking let him. Didn't even try to stop him." Because it had seemed easier. Because John and Rogue-still-channeling-John in the same room, both edgy and nervous with waiting, had made the plane tense enough to swim through the air. Because he always came _back_. "I let him," Bobby says again, soft and guilty.

"And you miss him," Warren said, equally quiet.

Bobby just nods, watching the kids running around the basketball court through the slightly frosted window.

"It's not your fault. He knew what he was doing. He might have gone anyway, even if you had tried to stop him." Warren tells him, trying to sound reassuring but mostly sounding awkward and out of his depth.

"Yeah." But he would have known Bobby didn't want him to go. Maybe then Pyro's eyes wouldn't be empty, even if he'd gone. Maybe there'd be something left. "I should have tried."

"Maybe," Warren answers awkwardly. "But you didn't make him do the things he did, either." He rustles his wings a little. "Bobby I . . . I'm sorry if it made it more difficult? My being in here. I didn't know - not at first."

Bobby shakes his head. "Not your fault." It wasn't. And he'd been an asshole anyway. Maybe Pyro was empty because Bobby'd stolen away St. John and morphed into him.

Maybe he was just a little crazy.

Warren lays a careful hand on his shoulder and Bobby wants to shrug it off. To hit him. To lash out and turn the room into an igloo. He doesn't do any of that. He pushes the anger down and away where he kept all the things he'd never said and all the people he'd never let himself be. "I'm not . . . John. But I'm here. I won't replace him and I'd never try. But . . . I'd like to be friends. If you'll let me." There's something lonely in Warren's voice and Bobby shuts his eyes, remembering long gone conversations and John's voice when he said that where he came from there weren't any friends, just people who'd screw you over to survive if they had to.

Warren didn't come from that. He came from a massive house he wasn't let out of for fear of being seen and tutors paid to keep silent. He didn't know what a friend was either.

Bobby doesn't know if he has the energy to teach someone else when it had gone so wrong the first time, and left him with this hole inside where his best friend used to be. He looks at Warren finally though and smiles, and Warren's blue eyes lighten, mouth answering the smile. Bobby rememberes the first time John's sullen face had smiled. How it had changed him, taking away the too-old expression. How it'd made Bobby feel to have been the first to earn that from him. Warren's face reminds him of that feeling.

Warren's expression - puppy dog eager and sweetly open - makes Bobby think maybe he **could** do this.

Warren left his hand on Bobby's shoulder, and his skin is soft and manicured -not the rough, too-warm skin John had had the rare times he touched Bobby. Rogue couldn't touch him, and Kitty did it less and less. It was nice. He felt less alone, even if he didn't know if it was real. Bobby didn't trust anything to last anymore. Didn't trust that good things lasted. Not when there were three new graves in the gardens and somewhere Pyro may or not be dead, and John had somehow faded away long before that.

But it was nice.

Warren studies his face and smiled again. "If he comes back - John. If he comes back, then I'll go," he tells Bobby.

Bobby shakes his head. "No - this is our room, now. If John comes back, then he'll have a new one." And everything would be different. Bobby would make sure it was. "Come on - it's almost dinner. It's shit tonight - we can go pick up something greasy."

Warren looks faintly taken aback. By the offer. By the language. By something. Like Bobby was a page in a book he hadn't quite learned how to read. But he smiles and follows like he wants to learn.

And Bobby smiles too. Because there is a piece missing still, but things went on, and maybe everything turned around in strange circles and went back to where it started, moved by forces he couldn't explain and would never understand.

And maybe that meant that, sometimes, you got a second chance.  
~~


End file.
